I've recently started a new job working for a marketing department and one of my roles is editing our company podcasts using audacity. I've used audacity before for recording music/ dj mixes etc but never sound editing. The process I've been following to clean up the sound is as follow:

This has all been gleaned from you tube tutorials. It's making the audio sound better but i'm still getting that high end tinny telephone twang in the recording as my boss is recording the podcast over skype using his laptop's built in Mic. He's wants the recording to sound like the conversation is happening in the room he's in, any advice on how to make this happen. Here's two links to my recent uploads, really stuggling to get them sounding better any advice would be greatly appreciated.

That's a simple Skype connection between Los Angeles and a house in the wilds of New Jersey. It's a test, not intended for anything but technical review. I wanted to make sure I could do it.

The catch is both Denise and I are seasoned broadcast professionals. She's sitting in a very quiet room speaking into the built-in microphone on her MacBook, but she's wearing her studio headphones.

I'm recording the whole thing in Los Angeles with a small sound mixer and two Macs.

And I, too am on headphones with a head-mounted, entertainment quality (non gamer) microphone. It's a ball of stiff wires. It doesn't take a good picture.

The Mac on the left is playing music into the mixer for integrating into the show, and is running Audacity to record the mixed, stereo show. As long as nobody tries to cross the sound pathways, that works perfectly correctly.

The Mac on the right is running Skype. That's all it's doing. Skype thinks it's running the whole show and it's perfectly content with this setup. It's when you mess with Skype that the trouble starts. Neither Skype nor Audacity plays well with others, to borrow the grade school report card note.

None of the Macs make fan or other noises and none of the Skype licenses is trying to do environment suppression or echo cancellation. That's what gives you that talking into a wine glass, honky sound. All those problems go away with quiet rooms and headphones. We've been doing this a long time.

Once you have Skype damage, it's impossible to remove with Audacity. We can't remove echoes or compression damage. So even without listening to the two clips, I'm betting you're trying to do Disaster Recovery, not Audio Post Production.

One other non-obvious note. I directly produced a fully-mixed, stereo show, just, you know, to do it. What I was supposed to do as obsessive engineer is record Denise on the left of a stereo show and me on the right. That gives me the opportunity to correct and filter one voice without messing up the other. Mix to each other and add music later.

Since you're in Windows, you might be able to use one of the Skype Recording products. As a fuzzy rule, the Pamela recorders work very well.

At one time, the upper two of the four Pamela licenses would give you the two separate voices tracks as very high quality WAVs. Capture software is a moving target, so I'll stick with the two computers. That works every time.

You may encounter performers who launch Audacity and Skype, make a perfect recording and go home. Those people are celebrity unicorns. They post on line how easy it was and nobody else can make it work.

And yes we're aware that we produced the perfect podcast. We spent the whole time discussing when to have the next podcast.

Hi Koz thanks for your reply, I've suggested a better audio set up but need to push the boss a bit more for it. As for recording and editing, my boss is recording on his Mac and sending the files to me via Dropbox a bit of a confusing set up but we've not got them running together. Thanks for your advice either way.

Is he on headphones? Even earbuds would help. It's the echo cancellation process that gives the distorted audio.

There is a completely different way to produce these things. Each location records their own microphone and ships the sound files to you for mixing. None of the sound goes through Skype and you miss the Skype distortions completely.

Thanks Koz that's what I've suggested to my boss he thinks it'll be difficult to get our guest speakers to source a microphone though and we don't want to put them off contributing I'll keep pushing for one though and earphones too.